The Devil's Rose's blog

2008-02-13 1:48 a.m.

What happened to my life? God.

The lyrics go to the Post Secret video, just in case that wasn't apparent. Who knows. I certainly don't. It's almost 2 AM, I have 2 midterms due in 7 hours, and more homework than I can possibly catch up. And what am I doing? Getting upset and writing in my journal.

What am I doing here? Why am I bothering with university? I never wanted this. I still don't. I miss my friends. I miss my family...or at least the version of my family that I keep in my head. I miss my dogs, cats, and chinchillas. I feel so out of control, so lost, so confused, it's amazing that I can still put two words together and type them out.

I don't even know where to begin. My life's just tumbling around me. Things are changing so quickly, nothing's staying the same. I'm unpredictable, and I hate it.

Last weekend, I got back in touch with a girl who was my absolute best friend when I was 11. End of story. But then she left my school, and we fell out of touch by the time I was 13. This was a big deal - when we were best friends, we would see each other all day at school, and then talk on the phone for another 4 hours at night. No matter what was going on in my life or hers, we knew everything...or almost. By the time I turned 15, I had been suicidal. I had taken way more advil than one is supposed to, in an attempt to kill myself, but had ended up crying so hard I made myself sick and threw it up before it could hurt me. I graduated high school at 18. She and I found each other on Facebook last year, just after I turned 19. We finally talked on the phone again on Saturday night, and got caught up on everything. It was almost like no time had passed...except, of course, it had. And I've done a lot of growing up, a lot of changing, in the eight years since I was eleven.

And I felt like I owed it to her to tell her how perilously close we'd all come to us not being able to have a reunion.

It was the hardest thing I've ever done, telling her what happened to me and why. I don't know why it was so hard, except that I finally had to stop lying to myself in order to tell the full story. Everybody else who knows me now, has been there to see the changes take place in my life, so I never had to explain it to them. It was just known, and if there was any confusion, nobody's brought it up with me. Even though I'm obviously not made of glass, it's like people are afraid to ask me to even intellectually return to those days and feelings. Not that I blame them. I can only imagine how difficult it is to hear that a friend sank that low and that there was nothing that could be done to stop it, even if you had known what was wrong.

But that's got me thinking. What if it would have been possible to change it? What if none of it ever had happened? I'm a much stronger person for what I've lived through, and no matter what happens to me now, I know I'll survive it. I'll survive it because my friends love me and I know that nothing is bad enough to warrant ending it all. But it took going to hell and back to realize that. It took a near-encounter with death to reach this point, and climbing up out of the grave I dug for myself was the hardest thing I've ever done.

I think that this world has a problem in a major way. Nobody knows how to help anyone anymore. We've stigmatized asking for help to the point where people with genuine problems hide them and pretend like everything's okay. All of my friends, my brother's friends, and my sister's friends, for years, thought that we merely had a difficult relationship with our mom. They didn't know she was abusive. They didn't know she'd been abused and was revisiting that cycle on us. And if they had known, what could they have done? Our society doesn't equip people with the knowledge needed to save even our own lives, let alone those of the people we love most.

And all of this comes swarming over me on a night when I have to do two take-home midterms and more Spanish homework than I should ever have let pile up. I'm failing at university...not literally, but my way of handling it is not sustainable. I'm going to swamp myself if I keep trying to make it work like this.

In high school, I did the same shit. But I was able to keep it up because my friends were there. I was able to keep it up because I had no other choice of escape avenue - if I could do well in school, I could be free.

My friends are my life. Literally. When I cried myself into throwing up the pills I had taken, it happened because my cat was the only one home with me. My cat is the most standoffish furry beast in the world, but that afternoon she came over and sat on my photo album just beside my bed, and started meowing at me to be petted. And then she climbed in my lap and started purring, and I started crying and apologizing to my cat. Apologizing for what she was going to see happen and not be able to stop; since animals can sense death, I felt guilty for what I would do to her. And I just sobbed and apologized over and over to my cat, who just kept purring, and as I began to feel a bit dizzy, I picked up my photo album, and flipped through the pictures and started apologizing to my friends in the photographs. And it all got to me, and I kept crying, harder and harder, until I started to do that weird cough/gagging thing that only crying can cause to happen, when I ran into the bathroom and threw everything up. And then I sat in the bathroom and cried, and tried to cuddle my kitty, who promptly clawed me and went to sit at the opposite corner of the bathroom and stare at me. Figures.

I don't know why I'm sharing this. It's just a haunted night, I guess.

This time last year, a friend of mine had a seizure. We're not friends anymore, but that's a different story for a different day. I have never been so scared for a friend before or since. And not only was I worried about him, but I had to take care of his girlfriend, who was in a panic. I'm good at handling disasters. I had to be, to handle myself. I'm a walking disaster, man, and don't you ever forget it. I may seem like I have my stuff together, but I don't.

Something I realized while talking to my friend on the phone: I'm not as recovered from the years of living with my mother as I thought I was. The memories, the pain, the fear, the feelings of inadequacy and unlovability and vulnerability, they're all still part of who I am. They're all still there, lurking below the surface like emotional piranhas, just waiting to drag me under and rip my flesh off my bones until what's left of me sinks to the bottom for good. I still self-injure: not by cutting. Never that. But I pick at scabs, and interfere with my healing process. I scratch my face - "popping zits" - but it's not to get rid of the pimples, it's to hurt myself. I pull my hair out. When I get nervy enough, I'll take a pair of tweezers and start pulling the hair out of my arms. I scratch myself until my skin burns, even when I'm not itchy. I enjoy making myself get hunger pangs. When I get my period, my cramps get so bad that eating makes me throw up, but I don't take anything to make them go away. I still feel like I deserve all the pain I get, and then some.

I'm a fucked up little girl.

I don't even know 99% of the reasons why I'm so screwy. I know some of them. But I can't even remember .1% of the things that have made me feel horribly about myself, so why should I know all the reasons that I've internalized as to why I'm so horrible?

And you know what? I think the thing I fear most is that I'm really as horrible as I've been told I am. That my mom was right, that I'm really not lovable, that I'm awful, hateful, miserable, and unwanted and that there's something wrong with me. That the only reason people keep me around is because I try so hard to please them, and everybody wants someone around to make them feel like they're important. I'm afraid that nobody loves me, nobody cares. That everyone would be better off if I had died when I tried to kill myself.

Intellectually, I know my fears are bullshit. I know that I have the best friends in the whole universe. I know they love me like I love them and that any of us would do anything for each other. That if I had died, there would be an irreparable hole in each and every one of their hearts and lives, and that they would never, ever, in a billion years believe that they're better off without me. I know that every person is beautiful, lovable, good, and wanted - to/by somebody. I know that. Really, I'm not just saying it. But I feel like I am. I feel like all this stuff I know is really just more lies that I'm telling myself. I feel like the more certain I am, intellectually, about something, the less likely it is that it's true.

It's like, I know my friends love me. But then I feel like, how could they? What's there to love? Or, I know I'm a strong person, but then I feel like I'm incapable of handling even the smallest difficulty in my life. It's like, I know that people are inherently good, but I feel like I can't possibly be. Or I know that people need me and would never wish that I had died, but I can't help but wonder if we aren't all keeping up some sort of farce and pretending like I'm better than I am.

Sometimes I just want to scream out, "It's okay, you can all stop pretending that you like me now! It's fine, I get it, I'll just leave you all alone now" and then really, actually leave, just to see if anybody actually follows me and actually, really, truly means it when they say that they aren't pretending. Of course, I wouldn't believe that they weren't pretending. Not really.

I wish my life weren't so screwed up. I wish I hadn't been emotionally abused - but I was, and it's always going to be there. It will never be gone. What can I say by way of explanation other than that, the more you hear something, it doesn't matter how certain you were to begin with that it wasn't true, you begin to internalize it anyway. And it's so difficult to undo that, to erase it, to internalize something different. And you begin to behave like you believe it, which then just reinforces it, and it's this whole fucking vicious cycle and there's nothing you can do to stop it and it eats you alive from the inside out until the person you were is totally alien from the person you are and...

Shit.

I think the emotional piranhas have caught me again. They're vicious little buggers, aren't they?

It's 2:40 AM now. I've been writing for almost an hour.

You know, forget everything I just wrote. I'm an emotional basket case because of my period right now, and Valentine's day being tomorrow.

I've always hated Valentine's day. Why do we need a special holiday just to tell someone we love them? Shouldn't we be doing that every day? I think we should.

I'd better get a quick nap before I try to reconfront my midterm exams. I'm too high-strung right now.

I'm okay, really. Well, maybe not entirely, but I will be. I just have to process everything - it may take me the rest of my life, but it will happen. And when that happens, then one day I will really be able to say that I'm okay.

And I'll mean it.

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